There is a kind of Fungi that I like. 지의류, [jee-ee-ryoo] in English “Lichen,” which sounds like “Liken.” Lichen has a unique life form in which fungus and algae coexist. I started to notice them when I was walking in the huge cemetery in New Haven. A cemetery has a dirt ground, trees, gravestones, and plenty of sunlight, making the perfect environment for Lichen to grow. Watching the silver-ish green pieces blooming here and there, I thought they look like petals and like armor. What would it feel like to wear armor that crumbles at the slightest touch? I was attracted to that duality.
Extracted from A Reflective Object, my thesis book submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Yale University with a major in Graphic Design in April 2025.
It was during my exchange semester in Germany that I first realized being Korean was a part of my identity. In a new environment, you start to notice the gaps and misalignments between yourself and your surroundings. It’s not only the place that feels foreign. You start to feel foreign to yourself as well. You become your own observer, looking into a mirror.
Language is where that sense of foreignness is most accentuated for me. It feels offbeat to pronounce my name with an American accent. And I would sometimes mishear “Do you wanna” as “Jeewon.” When I began bringing Korean text into my practice in the U.S., I often had to translate it as well. Translation is a deliberate act. Unlike speaking or thinking, where words emerge directly, translation begins with an original, and you connect the separated input and output languages. You examine what the original is trying to say, spend time choosing the closest possible twin in the translated language, and vice versa. It is almost impossible to fully represent the original, but the translated language gains a uniqueness that the original didn’t have. The translated language then shifts from being a surrogate of the original to becoming a mirror language. They may be unfamiliar to each other, but they are looking into one another. Now I see myself in the mirror—who seemed to be so foreign—and think, that is also me.
A mirror doesn’t show what’s behind it, but it has a certain quality of transparency in the sense that it reveals whatever it is facing. It is an X-ray object activated by confrontation. I keep returning to this image. As much as it can be jarring to look into that mirror, there is somethings therapeutic about being able to live your life as a foreigner to things.
I cannot stop looking at the mirror—A mirror that becomes bigger when I am far away from it. A mirror that shows me speaking another language. A mirror that feels like a twin.
Since the end of last year, I have been weaving together scraps of writing about “home” and my thoughts on Cholé Zhao’s Nomadland.
December 2024, On an Amtrak train to Newark Airport
With a large suitcase and a canvas tote crammed full of essentials to sustain a few days of my life, I sit among people who probably won't be able to read this text I'm typing in Korean. I find myself wondering: where or to what, am I bound?
December 2024, In Korea
My days in Seoul has been a combination of speaking a familiar language yet living a somewhat unfamiliarized life. This store had newly opened, that restaurant had closed down, playing a game of finding what's changed with each step I took. I often fail to recognize the same street when seen at day and night, so an unfamiliar landscape wasn't anything special. Even though time had passed since last time, people felt as if I had just seen them yesterday. Their voices, movements of bodies when they embraced me, subtle expressions shaped by small muscles in their faces, all of these made me feel safe. No matter what ground I stand on, I think maybe it is people who define "home" for me.
February 2025, In New Haven
Because the lease for my house ended sooner than expected, I learned I'd have to move out within a rather tight window after graduation. Friends offered to let me stay at their place when I had been worrying a lot about where to find a sublet. Once again, I think, home is not so much about a space, but about people.
March 2025, In New Haven
In Nomadland, "home" is not something permanent. Whether it is a space or a person, in the long run, everything is ephemeral. Of course, there are things I wish could stay as long as possible, but there are meetings and partings that cannot be controlled by my will. Many characters in the film, some of them actual nomads, aren't rebellious spirits refusing to be tied down. They have turned to a nomadic life rather in order to accept the inevitabilities of life.
Watching the movie, I kept thinking about the Buddhist concept of emptiness (空)—that nothing in this world has a fixed, unchanging essence, and that by truly sensing how everything is interconnected, one can achieve a kind of freedom, no longer bound by one's own flesh.
At times, wishing happiness for loved ones, hoping for the well-being of people I barely know, and being kind to complete strangers feels almost the same as treating myself with such. If we think of this world as broadly made up of "us," then wherever we go, whoever we are with, we are nomads, always at home.
Once you meet them face to face, even someone who seems utterly impossible to understand becomes, not some flat caricature of a monster but a person with many different sides. Dark Knight, who holds views on feminism that could hardly be more different from my own and believes that individuals bear the greatest responsibility for their own poverty, is, ironically, the person most willing to speak up for someone when they find themselves in difficult circumstances. YunB, who was most enthusiastic in rooting out the imposter, empathized with Banu’s position as a migrant when she arrived and welcomed her the most, while at times acknowledging his own prejudices and imperfections.
What sets The Community, a show about people with such different perspectives attempting to coexist, apart from other survival programs is that money and winning are not its only ultimate goals. The show feels less like a survival reality series, and it seems like a partial reenactment of life itself. And seen from that perspective, there are certain participants who stood out to me in particular: Hama, who maintained a fundamental faith in people’s goodwill even in relationships divided by opposing values; Ted, who considered the experience of living alongside others more valuable than his own survival or taking the prize money. They may not have made it to the very end or walked away with the prize, but I want to applaud them for showing that survival and winning are not everything—that there is a difference between survival and life.
I happend to come across an editorial written by Shin Hyung Chul in 2016.
It was a piece of writing talking about love and death through W. H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues. The first stanza calls for silence, the second asks us to join, and the third and fourth speak of personal grief.
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead.'
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
To explain the strong impression of the third and fourth stanza, Shin recalled Hirano Keiichiro’s essay “What am I.” This Japanese novelist advises to people struggling to find a true self or people who call themselves a hypocrite because of their many masks: It is better to admit that there are a lot of versions of oneself. He says “one” is not an individual but various “versions” existing together. We don’t meet everyone as the same version of ourselves. We create selves that only come into being in front of certain people, and “one” is a collective of those. So Shin wrote:
In this regard, we can take a look at these incidents called love and death. To love someone is not just to love the person themselves, but also the relationship you have with them—and the version of yourself that relationship brings into existence. I like myself the most when I am with you. I love you because you make me live in that best version of me. Now we can understand why losing loved ones are so painful. To lose someone you love is to lose a version of yourself created for that person. The relationship that existed only with that person dies with them. Not being able to see them again means never being able to live as that version of yourself again.
With this theory in mind, we can understand the despair in the third and fourth stanza better. The thrid stanza shows that the lost person gave the stability and direction in the narrator’s life, as if confirming it by every word. There are a lot of versions of myself inside me. The reason why I can endure other painful and disillusioned relationships is because the version of myself with you existed. Just one version made it possible for other versions to live on as well. When the most important person to me dies, the most important version of myself also does. Your funeral is always my funeral. Therefore the latter of this poem is a word from someone who is doing their own funeral.
Because we don’t have the power over life and death, we inevitably experience the loss and pain of our loved ones. There was a time when I was scared to love someone because it hurt so much to lose the person I thought who was always going to be there. But as Camus said, we must resist, although our existence is meaningless and we are all heading to death. The pull of love feels stronger than the fear of loss. If life is a resistance to death, love is a resistance to pain. So even with all the uncertainties, we choose to extend ourselves toward another.
Maybe I’ve gotten a bit too serious. I just wanted to say, I like myself when I am with you. I love you, who brings out that version of me. So please stay with me, stay healthy, as long as you can. That is the only thing I want from you.
This is such a small thing, but I liked how you put your hands in your pants pockets when we went to eat Sujebi at Noryangjin a few days ago. I wonder why I liked that so much.
I came over to your place for the first time in the past three years. The last time was before your exchange semester, so it was summer 2018. I rang the bell and said hi to S, who got the door for me. I used to think the two of you look totally different, but now I see a lot of you in S’s delicate face.
Seeing you in your room, I felt like you were just you, my friend I used to know, and not a patient, so I spent time sitting next to you muttering about how I’ve been, and reading things on your bookshelves. I was thinking of the time we spent in that room. A lot of things changed since then, but your room has remained almost the same. I’ve done my thesis show, started working, got a new job, the seasons changed thirteen times, and all the while the time had been frozen in that room. I didn’t know something so familiar and fond would make me feel so sad.
I went to my grandma’s place to install Zoom on her PC. She’s a practicing Catholic, and because of Covid, her church had transitioned Bible study sessions online. “It’s such a convenient time,” I said. Grandma replied that it seemed convenient, but she was trying hard to catch up. Technologies that feel natural to my generation are things her generation has to learn carefully, sometimes with sticky notes lined up across the desk. Still, she picked up how to use Zoom very quickly. She and the nun exchanged a few words to test the connection, and the meeting ended.
After that, I lent her From the Gaze by Saerang Jeong. It was a book I had picked up a few days ago when I was at ARC·N·BOOK in Hannam-dong. The main character, Shim Shisun (whose name means "gaze" in Korean), is about my grandma’s age. Her children are close to my mom’s age, and her grandchildren are my peers. When I first read the line printed on the book band—“Love from the 21st century, devoted to the women who lived the 20th century”—I immediately thought it would be perfect for us three to share. I loved the book so much that I recommended it to my mom, and after reading it, she told me to lend it to Grandma too. I hope she enjoys it just as much.
I think my grandma’s life is awesome. She survived the Korean War, leaving her home in the North to settle in the South. She studied English literature, raised three children, and lost her husband while still relatively young. Even so, she has lived a life fuller and happier than anyone I know. She lives alone, has a lot of friends, travels and volunteers tirelessly, watches Netflix and reads detective novels with passion, and tends to fifty pots of plants as part of her daily routine. Grandma never told me how I should live or what kind of person I should become. But watching her, I can’t help but think: if I can grow old the way she has, wouldn’t that be the most wonderful life?
Before I left, grandma handed me a small blue bead called the evil eye, a symbol of protection in Turkish culture. “Why are you giving this to me grandma? You should have all the luck,” I said. Grandma placed the bead in my palm saying, “I already had all the fortune I needed.” Once again I thought, I want to be someone like her.
We became friends when we were eleven. We lived in the same old apartment complex and shared the name “지원.” We were almost the same height and looked alike that sometimes people thought we were sisters. We both loved art. You played the cello, and I made paintings. Like our shared name, we saw each other as our other selves.
Nothing in this world lasts forever, but I never once doubted that we would be best friends for life. And I still believe we are, even though you can’t hear me now, lying in a hospital bed. I don’t know how to accept this. I never imagined a future without you.
The last time we spoke, you said, “My whole body hurts so much,” over the phone when you were in Oakland and I was in Seoul. That was the last thing I heard from you. It still doesn’t make sense. We weren’t prepared for something like this. You are only twenty-three. And you will turn twenty-four in just two months.
I don’t even know what I should be angry at, but I am. It is so unfair. You are only twenty-three.
I cried over the phone last Wednesday. For some reason, hearing someone’s voice made me spill out even more. I don’t know why I called you. If I had been looking for emotional support, there were others I could have called. Even you have said that you lack empathy. And jokes aside it is quite true, you often come across as cold and dry from the outside. But perhaps that is why I called you. I wanted the most boring, ordinary kind of comfort from someone who seemed the least likely to offer it. I think I needed that.
After a good cry I felt much better. We ended the call laughing.
Today is April 14, 2025. I am in New Haven, reading this piece of writing from almost five years ago. I am still grateful that you picked up the phone and listened to me so patiently. I don’t remember the exact words I said. I wonder if you do. Weirdly I recall you saying that you grew a habit of drinking a little bit of whiskey on the rock before going to bed. If you ever read this, thank you again.
Oddly enough, everything I liked in this house was yours
A wooden cutting board perfectly sized
Tiny egg cups we used as shot glasses
A rough brown blanket with a comforting weight
While slicing onions and tearing up
When sipping bitter drinks
When watching movies on cold nights
The things that always quietly kept me company
You speak loosely, but you're surprisingly diligent, and good at skateboarding. You're left-handed, fluent in English, Spanish, and German. You love tequila. You dream of raising a dog, a cat, and a horse. Even with poor eyesight, you only wear glasses when you drive. You write down every important thing in your diary. You're a sucker for the color orange. You can bake the best apple pie. You sometimes pick up the guitar because you like country music. You can't stand a stain on the table, but you'll paint with color on your lips without ever noticing.
The first time I felt the nausea was the winter of 2013 transitioning to 2014. Like Roquentin, I didn’t no why. Maybe it’s the winter, maybe it will get better in spring, I thought. But even when the flowers were in full bloom, nothing changed. For a brief moment each morning, I felt a fragile relief knowing that I was still alive. But the rest of the time I trembled with nausea. The fact that there was no reason for my nausea felt like a dead end, and nothing seemed capable of curing that despair.
One day I was humming “Let It Be” by The Beatles while taking a shower. While Mother Mary didn’t come to me in that difficult time, my heart was submerged with the warmth of water. But that was it. As soon as I stepped outside of the shower, the nausea returned like a wave. I resented myself for not being able to believe in any god.
That was when I started to read Sartre. Existence precedes essence was an immense consolation. It was the first sentence to tell me that “no reason” could simply be. It was the first to suggest that meaningless might not be an ending but a beginning.
The Nausea has not left me and I don't believe it will leave me so soon; but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.
The 18-year-old me kept praying on something, or anything, wishing the nausea would go away forever. Now I know that it is an inevitable part of my being. Sartre said he wrote Nausea for his own salvation, and that same frail, suffering human voice became a comfort to so many. It was heartbreakingly beautiful that the serenity I longed for didn’t come from the divine, but from other people who were broken like me.
in:draft is Jeewon Kim's space for half-private thoughts. When I'm not writing here, I design for a living and watch a lot of film & TV.
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